Saturday, October 18, 2008

Trip-Wire Marketing: Go Guerrilla!

Trip wires are used by guerillas and regular military to set off explosives or warn that a parameter has been breached. The enemy breaks the wire hidden in the undergrowth, detonating a grenade strapped to a nearby tree. Or, the intruder breaks a trip wire to set of a warning bell.

Trip wires rely on two key elements: stealth and positioning. Both are important to the effectiveness of the tactic. If the wire isn’t properly hidden, it may be spotted by a sharp-eyed scout. And, if the trip wire doesn’t cross a well-beaten path, what’s the point, guerilla warfare-wise?

Trip wire marketing relies on the same two principles: stealth and position, and the tactic is useful in improving both SEO and conversion ratios.

Where’s the Message?There’s no guarantee that a site visitor will come through the front door. Deep links, buried beneath several drill down screens, may serve as the access point for a visitor depending on the query words employed by the search engine user.

That means a visitor may never see that glitzy home page, and never read about the benefits of a site owner’s goods or services. If the primary explanation of service benefits is described in an article in the site’s archives, key sales information may well be missed by potential buyers.

Trip-Wire MarketingMarketing and promotion are about pushing the right buttons and creating need. The guy in the $65K Jaguar needs the prestige and status. Otherwise, he’d have bought a Camry. The needs that drive purchases are broad. The need to love and be loved, the need to belong, the need for respect, power, money – just some of the human motivators that turn browsers into buyers.

The key to boosting sales is to position trip wire text links along the well-beaten paths of the web site. Metrics analysis will reveal access points by popularity. Trip wire links to sales and ordering information should be placed within sight of all access points.

Visitor activity will determine where to place trip wires. For example, a visitor may access the site through a side door, read the informational article listed on the SERPs and decide she wants to learn more. A trip wire link, right there, pushes the right buttons in the right place on the site, linking the visitor to the appropriate page.

Thus, a site owner must not only understand the motivations that drive sales, s/he must also have the opportunity to push those buttons and encourage the most desired action (MDA).

SEO BenefitsSpiders follow links. However, bots don’t always crawl each site page the first time through. In fact, Google provides a look at what pages are in its index and which have been missed.

Trip wire links provide crawling spiders more avenues to explore, keeping them on-site longer, leading to more complete and accurate indexing faster.

It’s not just what your site text says, it’s where the text is positioned that delivers maximum benefit. Well-traveled site paths should employ trip-wire marketing tactics to improve conversion ratios and encourage crawlers to stick around a little longer.